Stanford Will Teach You Apple’s Swift for Free

Interested in building iOS apps with Apple’s new(ish) Swift programming language? Want to learn Swift for free? Stanford University’s School of Engineering now offers a set of lectures (available on iTunes) on Swift, covering everything from user-interface design and animation to networking and performance considerations.

But this isn’t a beginners’ series: Prerequisites include C language and object-oriented programming experience “exceeding Programming Abstractions level” as well as “completion of Programming Paradigms.” (Fortunately, Programming Abstractions and Programming Paradigms are likewise available from Stanford via iTunes.) Stanford also recommends that anyone pursuing its Swift course come with knowledge of UNIX, graphics, and databases.

Apple unveiled Swift at its 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). For years, third-party developers relied on Objective-C to build apps for Mac OS X and iOS devices. While Objective-C remains a popular programming language, many developers find it difficult to use. Apple hopes that Swift, which boasts features such as real-time outputs, will make iOS and Mac OS X more accessible to more developers, strengthening those platforms’ already-formidable app stores.

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Author Bio

Nick Kolakowski has written for The Washington Post, Slashdot, eWeek, McSweeney's, Thrillist, WebMD, Trader Monthly, and other venues. He's also the author of "A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps" and "Slaughterhouse Blues," a pair of noir thrillers.